No new build today, I worked on an FBO class. Now everything is drawn to an FBO, which is scaled up to fill the screen using nearest neighbour interpolation. This makes it easy to adhere to a blocky pixel grid without any effort; I've used it in lots of games before.

I also added a quick fullscreen mode, really nice and simple now I can target 10.5 and above.

I've updated the first post with a new screenshot, binary and objective.

Didn't get as much done this weekend as I'd have liked, but at least now I have a moveable camera and some kind of routine for updating game objects.

Next up will be sorting out some nice camera movement, limiting it to the level bounds. I'll also try out different methods for my main loop timing – I don't think I need interpolation, but I feel like I should be able to get rid of the occasional skipped frames.

I'm really looking forward to getting a controllable vehicle and some physics going.

It depends. A lot of OpenGL performance hits are delayed until you actually flush the buffer.

Though yes, in general changing the texture for each quad you draw can be many times more expensive than drawing the quad without changes. Also, the draw calls themselves are very expensive. If you set the texture once, write a bunch of triangles to a buffer, then draw them all at once it's generally several times faster. Heck, for tile data you can just generate the geometry once anyway.

New build, with a parallaxing background! Download it from the link at the top and have a play, if you like. (No gameplay yet, just move around using the arrow keys).

The level is defined by a plist in the package, in a simple format. The tile map is in there too. So if you get bored you can always have a go at creating your own. Which reminds me, I'm having a hard time deciding whether I need a level editor, or if I should just use a text editor and keep editing the level files.

I've finally made another build, you can grab it from the link at the top.

The main new feature: the editor. Activate it from the file menu, hold tab to select a tile from the palette and use the mouse to paint with it. Switch between layers using the number keys.

Open and save work, but you have to manually create or copy the map file (there's one in the bundle if you want to have a go). A lot of map settings still have to be changed by editing the file. But hopefully it has enough features now to let me get started on making some rooms.

I tried out a few different things before I settled on this in-game version. It makes sense to have a separate editor palette window, but I got confused with the multiple OpenGL contexts, and it looked ugly - not a big deal, I know, but I really like the retro feel of having it in the game.

A *HUGE* kudos for supporting ASDF keyboard layout properly in Dvorak keyboard mode... you are using keycodes rather than the letters themselves that are being hit. You just got a +1 in my mind
Fun looknig visuals, Cmd-R pixelated is truly excellent!